Veit Sanner's Blog

After showing how workflow constants can help you with environment information in my last post  How to Handle Environment Variables with Nintex Workflow , I am going to explain how workflow constants can be used in your deployment scripts. Starting of we create a workflow constant at website level. Therefore go to the Site Settings  of the site where you want to use the workflow constant, then select Manage workflow constants under Nintex Workflow.  Select New from the ribbon and create a workflow constant with the following settings: click to enlarge Then open the command prompt and switch to the Nintex Workflow 2010 install folder. (Typically: C:\Program Files\Nintex\Nintex Workflow 2010) . In order to export the workflow constant you have just created enter the following command: 1: nwadmin -o ExportWorkflowConstants -siteUrl [url to your site] -outputFile wfconst_dev.xml -includeSite The output file  wfconst_dev.xml contains all workflow c...

A topic you sure will run across is how to handle environment variables when you deploy workflows designed with Nintex Workflow. The values are by definition just valid for one specific environment, and have to be changed in order to deploy the workflow into another environment. Example for environment variables are URLs of web services or service accounts, which are different between development, test and production system. Basically, there are three ways how you can handle this information: store the information within the workflow activity create a workflow variable create a workflow constant Most people start with alternative 1 . The environment specific information is directly configured on the workflow activities. This has one advantage: You are pretty fast when you configure the activities the first time. But in the long run the disadvantages outweigh. After deploying the workflow from environment to the next stage, you have to update all affected activities. Beside th...

First looking at the action "Pause for..." I was thinking think that I could configure the delay period precisely to the minute. However, when I used this activity I discovered that the activity did not behave as I as expected. This was especially true when I entered an interval shorter than five minutes. I always waited longer than configured. Looking deeper, I found out that the cause for this is the SPTimerJob job-workflow  which controls the triggers for " Pause for... ". This timer job runs with the standard configuration every five minutes. If you set " Pause for... " to a shorter interval, the trigger send by the timer job will be sent every five minutes anyway. The same applies when you set the action to pause the workflow for any period of time that lies between the configured schedule for job-workflow . Of course, an option to solve this issue is to reconfigure the timer job to run in shorter intervals. But ask yourself if this is really nece...